Crowdsourced teams can write informational articles better than what single individual journalist writers can, say scientists at Carnegie Mellon University School of Computer Science Human-Computer Interaction Institute (CMUSCSHCII) which is a top institution of human-computer interactions science.
"This is exciting because …

They're "journalists"...

Lazy

Lazy would be posting a link to say "type it into Google," but not doing it yourself and realizing there's a flood of stuff on the guy, but very few actual pictures. Not to mention verifying they're of the correct guy, especially when he goes by "Niki":

seems like its time...

Can we have a facepalm icon please?

So..

I guess those at CMU are the type that don't read the manual?

Case in point...

A client of mine had crowd sourced a release manual for an internal software project.

Since most of the work was offshored, the developers who wrote the code were not native English speakers. Since the contract worker responsible for prepping the manual was also not a native English speaker, what you ended up with is a bunch of poorly written paragraphs that weren't organized and impossible to read. In short it was a joke.

The point is that you may be able to get more facts by crowd sourcing, yet an article must also tell a story and that requires someone who has taken some English writing courses as well as had some experience.

As a CMU graduate

I have to thank Lester for giving this story and HCII the respect they both deserve. Actually, I was going to be very cross that El Reg would stoop as low as to refer to HCI as a science (yes, there is some very interesting work that is done in that field, but the art and design components dominate the science and engineering aspects), but then I realized that this was probably intentional.

Seriously, they claim that the aggregate cost of answering 30 questions is the same as writing an article that answers those questions. Hmm, how about the cost of identifying the questions first, and stitching the answers together at the end (I believe some people call this editing). I took a few classes in HCII and this reaffirms my general opinion of them.

A+++++++ Troll would troll again

I love the way that not only did the article read like it had been crowdsourced, but it also had that beautifully-baited hook about not knowing if Aniket was a woman or a man in order to get commentards to rush off and try and crowdsource information for it!

Wow

42

Fine, if "good enough" is good enough

When I took a master's level class in Technical Journalism, our professor began by teaching the five Ws (Who, When, Where, What, Why). Your first sentence, he added, must summarize what your story is about.

I asked, "If you were to survey Pulitzer Prize-winning science articles, how many would obey these rules?" Our prof smiled broadly. "You're right, Maryland, USA. These guidelines will help you create serviceable writing. They're not what you'd folllow to pen great writing."